A 2.2-km 39-GHz Transceiver System for UAV Application

This article presents a 2.2-km high-speed transceiver system for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video streaming applications at a 39-GHz band. This proposed system includes transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) modules, which are developed from TX/RX chips and flip-chip mounted on an IC package substrate, a pair of high-gain active antennas, and software-defined radio (SDR) modules for data-to-image conversion. The TX provides an estimated effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of 37 dBm from the measured RX spectrum. Active antennas of TX and RX provide up to 37- and 40-dB antenna gain, respectively. The presented flip-chip TX provides 11.6 dBm of saturated power (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$P_{\mathrm {sat}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and 13 dB of conversion gain (CG), while the flip-chip RX delivers 18 dB of CG. The real-time video system’s characteristics have been demonstrated outdoors, marking the first video demonstration of a kilometer-scale long-range transmission at 39 GHz in UAV applications.